High-Leverage Practices

In a group discussion, the teacher and students work on specific content together, using one another’s ideas as resources. The purposes of a discussion are to build collective knowledge and capability in relation to specific instructional goals and to allow students to practice listening, speaking, interpreting, agreeing and disagreeing. The teacher and a wide range of students contribute orally, listen actively, and respond to and learn from others’ contributions. Teachers work to ensure students are positioned as competent among their peers, that patterns of interaction are respectful, and that the collective work of the group uses the strengths of and benefits each student.

Explaining and modeling are practices for making a wide variety of topics, academic practices, and strategies explicit to students. Teachers determine when explaining or modeling can help to make visible to students content and practices that often remain tacit. Teachers might use simple explanations when working with straightforward content. They might choose modeling, which includes verbal explanation as well as thinking aloud and demonstrating when sharing the metacognitive process, to provide greater access to students about strategies and practices.

Teachers pose questions that create openings for students to share their thinking about specific academic content. They seek to understand student thinking, including novel points of view, new ideas, ways of thinking, or alternative conceptions. Teachers draw out student thinking through carefully chosen questions and tasks and attend closely to what students do and say. They consider and check alternative interpretations of student ideas and methods. Teachers are attentive to how students might hear their questions and to how students communicate their own thinking. Teachers use what they learn about students to guide instructional decisions, and to surface ideas that will benefit other students. By eliciting and interpreting student thinking, teachers position students as sense-makers and center their thinking as valuable.

Every content area has norms and practices for how people construct and share knowledge. These norms and practices vary across subjects but often include establishing hypotheses, providing evidence for claims, and explaining one’s reasoning to others. Teaching students these norms and practices, showing why they are important, and providing opportunities to use them, is crucial for building understanding and capability in a given subject. Teachers name these norms and practices as students use them, and they provide scaffolds, model, and then offer opportunities for students to use the norms and practices.

Teachers set and maintain community expectations and establish classroom environments that preserve students’ dignity and autonomy, while allowing for a productive and safe classroom community. They understand the difference between the helpful use of boundaries to provide structure and the oppressive use of power to control. They develop proactive and reactive systems to establish, maintain, and respond to these expectations and behaviors in ways that focus on both the community and students’ learning. Choosing and using expectations and agreements requires discretion because many common expectations for behavior privilege dominant ways of being related to race, class, and gender and lead to harmful consequences for students.

Teachers organize time, space, and materials to support students to engage in the regular tasks of classroom life. Through the selection and use of organizational routines, teachers establish learning environments in which students have equitable access to resources, time, space, and voice in the classroom. Teachers introduce students to routines and provide opportunities to practice, analyze, and modify the routines. In some cases, they develop and enact routines collaboratively with students. Choosing and using routines requires discretion because many routines silence and marginalize some students and propagate dominant ways of being related to race, class, and gender.

Teachers use small group work when the learning goals profit from interaction and collaboration among students. To do this, they choose tasks that require and foster collaborative work, provide clear directions that enable groups to work independently, and hold students accountable for collective and individual learning. Teachers use their own time strategically, deliberately choosing which groups to work with, when, and on what. Teachers work to ensure students are positioned as competent among their peers, that patterns of interaction are respectful, and that the collective work of the group uses the strengths of and benefits each student.

Teachers intentionally build and sustain respectful relationships with students in the classroom. Teachers who form strong and connected relationships with students are able to work collaboratively with them and manage power dynamics in ways that increase student participation, engagement, and achievement. Respectful teacher-student relationships are characterized by trust, care, joy, and appreciation of students’ cultures and communities. Teachers develop their relationships in all aspects of their teaching, including small conversations with individuals, notes to students, nonverbal signals, and how they respond to and acknowledge students during lessons.

Careful and sensitive communication between teachers and families supports student learning. Teachers communicate with families to learn more about children from the people who know them best. Teachers share information about children’s activities, learning, and development. Teachers seek ways to partner with families. Communication may take place in person, in writing, or in phone calls. Every conversation with a family is an opportunity for the teacher to communicate a respectful, open attitude and create a space for a two-way conversation. Teachers must be attentive to considerations of language and culture, caring and valuing of families, and oriented to working with families to support children.

Teachers must actively learn about their particular students in order to design instruction that will meet their needs. This includes being deliberate about trying to understand the cultural norms for communicating and collaborating that prevail in particular communities, how cultural and religious views affect what is considered appropriate in school, and the topics and issues that interest individual students and groups of students. It also means being sensitive about what might be happening in students’ personal lives so as to be able to support students appropriately.

Carefully sequenced lessons help students develop deep understanding of content and capability with skills and practices. Teachers design lessons to provide opportunities for student inquiry and discovery as well as for practice with foundational concepts and skills. Effectively designed lessons maintain a coherent focus while keeping students engaged. They also help students connect how what they are learning contributes to their long-term learning goals.

Feedback supports learning by focusing students’ attention on specific aspects of their work and supporting their ongoing learning. Good feedback is specific, focused, and not overwhelming in scope, and supports students’ positive perceptions of their own capability. Giving skillful feedback requires the teacher to make strategic choices about the frequency, method, and content of feedback and to communicate in ways that are understandable by students. Feedback can be provided in many forms, including written and oral and these each require consideration of how the mode of communication might shape students’ experience of the feedback.

Learning to teach and continuing to improve requires regular analysis of instruction and its effectiveness. Teachers study their own teaching and that of their colleagues in order to improve their practice. Analyzing instruction may take place individually or with colleagues and involves identifying patterns, opportunities, and specific moves, and making hypotheses for how to improve. Reflective teachers ask themselves continuously how they might be contributing to the perpetuation of racism and oppression through specific actions or failures to act and seek out resources to support these reflections, including colleagues with similar goals. They pay close attention to and study their students’ contributions, work, and engagement, and challenge themselves to see and understand more, and to consider how their own actions are supporting or impeding their students to flourish. They systematically interrogate their underlying assumptions and seek to develop new instructional habits and strategies that support students to thrive.